I got in the Battlefield: Bad Company Beta on the Xbox 360. It started today and runs for a month. I spent a while playing the it this afternoon and thought I’d share my first impressions. Before getting to that though here are the basic details. “The beta has 2 maps, Oasis and Ascension. Oasis has all the available vehicles (heavy tank, light tank, armored car, attack helicopter, and artillery) to use in a flooded desert valley near a bustling city. Ascension drops players into a mountaintop village surrounding a monastery. The beta has a single game mode call Gold Rush. This game style tasks one team of defenders with holding off the attackers as they try to destroy a series of gold crates scattered throughout the map. If the attackers manage to destroy all of the crates, either by shooting them or planting charges, they win the round. For every set of crates they take, the attackers get a boost to their number of reinforcements and a new area of the map opens up to fight over.”

So far I’ve only played matches on Oasis. The beta is having some issues right now with high loads which make for very long times searching for games to play in. I tried the option to join a quick match and waited over 10 minutes before it told me none were available. So, I then when to the custom match and basically left it to any and it found me a match in about 3 minutes. I’m hoping the full retail game doesn’t have these issues and that they are specific to the beta.

There are a few other things that I’ve found to be annoying right off the bat. First, in the beta there is no way to get in a room with your friends. You can only join random rooms and there is no option to invite. The full retail game will have an option to invite your friends, but they did not get that into the beta. The other annoying thing is there is no way to chat with your whole team. This is less annoying since none of my friends are in the match, but it makes it hard to coordinate attacks. The in-game chat is squad based . It also seems to have a proximity based chat. However, there is no way in the beta to set who your squad mates are so you just have to hope the people on your squad actually have heat sets on and they don’t have their voice setting set to friends only.

Once I was actually able to get in some matches the game is pretty fun if you ignore the fact it is virtually impossible to coordinate any kind of attack because no one is talking. However, if you can accept this and just run around on your own killing people it is pretty fun. There are tons of vehicles to use. I tried 4 or 5 different ones and the all handled pretty much like I though they would. The controls are a little different for some of the vehicles because you need to be able to shoot and accelerate, but once you take a look at how they lay it out under the Options menu it makes sense. The range of vehicles is staggering. Most of the vehicles will also allow you to take other teammates with you and have them man a gun. For the lighter vehicles like hummers having a second person is the only way to have the gun be used. For tanks the driver fires the primary gun and the rider fires the secondary guns.

In addition to all the vehicles there are a good number of weapons to use in the game as well. I find it hard to believe that anyone would not be able to find the type of weapon set they prefer. In addition to the vehicles and weapons there are also multiple types of turrets setup for the defending team to use. Sure, it a sniper gets behind you they’ll pick you off the turret before you know they are there, but that is a risk well worth taking when multiple tanks are bearing down on your base.

Another option I liked that I’ve only seen in a few other games is that when you die you can choose to respawn at your base or with your squad mates. If you reswawn at your base you have access to any of the available vehicles, but you then may have to drive 3/4 of the way across the map to get back in the action. If you spawn with your squad you come in with one of your teammates. If they are driving a vehicle you will be put in the secondary seat so you can man a gun for them, but if they are on the ground walking you’ll join in right beside them. Spawning with your squad gets you right in the action, but you don’t have your own vehicle. The one thing I’m hoping they have that I just could not figure out was to be able to choose which squad mate to spawn with. It seems like something they would have an option for, but I could not figure out how to switch which squad mate I would spawn with. However, since I did not know anyone in the games it did not really matter. It would have been more annoying if my friends were playing and I could not spawn with them.

I’m planning to spend some more time with the Battlefield: Bad Company beta over the next month, but I’m torn between it and Rainbow Six: Vegas 2. If I come across anything else noteworthy about the beta I’ll post and let everyone know.